


The Deal Was We'd Be Timeless

by LittleDesertFlower



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Based on New Who dynamics, M/M, Melancholy, Not Beta Read, One Shot, Poetic, The Doctor doesn't run away, Time War (Doctor Who), Unhappy Ending, pre-new who
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-08
Updated: 2020-09-08
Packaged: 2021-03-06 21:20:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,713
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26355616
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleDesertFlower/pseuds/LittleDesertFlower
Summary: In the midst of the Last Great Time War, the fulfillment of a prophecy is all that is still keeping them away from their final death… but so many memories can fit between a Time Lord’s last heartbeats.
Relationships: The Doctor/The Master (Doctor Who)
Kudos: 2





	The Deal Was We'd Be Timeless

We couldn’t have foreseen what was to come.

Skies drowning in smoke and metal from ships that aren’t ours. I don’t think, now, that it matters whose ships they are. They’ve been appearing on the horizon for so long that it does not matter.

Hovering ships that spin in slow circles and wait patiently.

Cities fall when the enemy descends from them. A plague in metal that only brings one word with it: exterminate. They’re the chorus of inescapable death. Bones crumbling to the floor, flesh sizzling and vanishing. We could survive them, if they didn’t come in such big numbers. Enough to make our orange skies rusty with their metal ships.

We’re not surviving them.

It’s been going on long enough. We shouldn’t.

But when they slither, slow creatures of little else but evil reason, and find their way across the desert, this is what they will find. A patch of something that has never belonged. If I could let anything survive the history of this planet, I would fight tooth and nail for this to outlive us all. Broken, lost, without a single piece of wood exactly in its right place. Let this be the true remnant of Time Lord history.

When they come, when this starts—when it begins to end—

“We could still run away.”

Let _this_ be the true remnant of Time Lord history. Of mine, at least. The space between two hearts and the stretch of red grass where now there is only desert for miles and miles. A friend that’s always been more, a voice calling from another room. Your voice, always some distance away. Always calling me.

“It’s too late…” I say in the distance between rooms. The skies will fall soon. “They’re already here.”

And the war has already started. The war we are fighting started the day we knew this day would come and decided the information had reached us too late.

Footsteps on the mismatching wood. You drag your feet when you walk now, when once you were ready to leap into the sunset. Time has made us slow. Too many lives to count, too many days to care whether or not there is something waiting. But it’s the hours that have withered you.

Once you would have leapt into the sunset, now you have to lean on door frames. Now, you walk from chair to chair. And sometimes the floor is enough. This house is all floorboards.

Scratches made by your fingernails. Dents on the walls bearing the mark of my knuckles.

Too many of all measurements of time. For too long.

“And so it ends…” you say, already breathless. Your chest comes to rest against my back. It’s automatic. I don’t want it any other way.

We might be about to watch the collapse of our home planet. But what has been built here will last at least a second longer than one of the universe’s mightiest civilizations. With the door open to the desert, every last piece of it crumbling will reach us. Every scream. Death and destruction, the language war speaks best. Where is mercy? Where is truce?

Peace… Where did we last leave you?

“Hold me,” I tell you.

If everything’s coming to its end, this is what I want mine to be like.

I left everything. I would leave it again. To be here, to die here. With you. As many times as the universe let me. Time has its rules, and I would beg it, on my knees, for an eternity and a half, just so that I could.

I haven’t always been graceful, I haven’t always been kind. And I don’t care. All that is in the past. The future we have is extermination. The present is this. Desert warmth, falling skies and… this.

I don’t care that I’ve always had it.

We’re Time Lords. You know how much the _now_ matters when you can’t have a _next_. When you can’t visit a _then_.

You hold my hand first. You’ve always done that, since the beginning.

Monsters used to plague you. The barn was so quiet, I could almost hear them, lurking around the beds. Their breaths, shrill and slow, terrified me too. We were children, all children fear the monsters in the dark. And children who are not children anymore fear the monsters inside them.

I always knew, when you called my name in whispers, which monsters it was. Or if you just wanted a friendly voice to talk to. But I came up to your bed anyway, and snuck under your covers, because a monster is a monster and you were afraid of something, even if you didn’t know. And, maybe, I wanted you to be a little afraid, too, so you’d keep calling me. The nights have always been long in Gallifrey, haven’t they? And at that time dreaming alone had a cost.

Your right hand, my right hand. Your chin tucked in my shoulder.

“Hold me…” I say again.

The skies will fall soon around us.

Time runs thin. The thread of it is being severed slowly. The less I have of it, the more I want. Why don’t you want more of it? Why am I always the child who wants, the child who craves while you’re content? When we were children, it was the other way around.

You grew up to be better than me.

“It’s ending. The end is here,” you mumble against my neck.

I want to stay like this forever. I want to make a forever. Didn’t they tell us, in the Academy, when we grew out of the barn, that forever was guaranteed for people like us? Why did we ever believe in forever? All there is is a now that stretches like gum and then breaks like glass.

And this now is so much better than what there used to be. Because now you might be tired, you might be sick and we might be too old to remember, but I still do remember.

We lived here because there was nowhere else. And the pain of a thousand lives was going through you. Four knocks, four heartbeats forever echoing inside you. You could only speak of the pain, whenever you’d speak. And I would sit in the opposite room, punching the walls until I bled. The fact that I was the polished one out of the two of us because you were so much more ill than me made me want to burn down planets. I didn’t want the rights of being the polished anything. I still don’t.

But when you got quiet, when things were okay, and my blood dried and you bandaged my fists, I saw the beauty of having bandages. Of your stubble and your crooked smile. We had little, but it was better than before, when we’d had to hold hands through warm nights to survive the next day.

We sat on the floor, you counted heartbeats and I held your hands in mine. And somehow, some days, it hit me that we had no choice but to live through that hell. Noise and pain. Realizations and guilt. What difference did it all make? We weren’t children anymore, but these were our monsters. And we were still surviving long warm desert nights. And the long warm desert days that we dreaded would always come after.

“You know…” you tell me now. “So many times, in the past… I thought of ending this early. Playing with fate a little. Maybe it would have changed things.”

“Time can be rewritten,” I say. “But not this time.”

“If I’d hurt you, you would have left. You would have joined them, or run away. You might have been out there in the universe, either fighting the Daleks on your own… or living a happy life, away from all of this.”

If time could be rewritten the way we want it to, I wonder if any of us would have dared break this off to fight a war we hate. Would we have joined any sides? Would we have run away into the universe and pretended it never happened? Time Wars tend to reach all corners of it, all corners of time and space. They’re inescapable. The only way to run away from them is to stay as close as you can and close your eyes. A Time War only ends when its epicenter explodes, taking you down with it.

We could have tried so many things to stop this, prevent this, or channel it all differently. But that’s the thing with prophecies and fixed events. The wave always returns to the ocean, one way or another.

“Would you have hurt me?” I ask you.

Would I have hurt you? I wonder myself.

We don’t have the stomach for it. If the war depends on that to happen, then it has been brewed on our own defeat. So many times, we could have simply just… ended each other, walked away.

“Don’t you wish it was that easy?” you ask. “Don’t you wish you’d just… known how to stay aside?”

Known how to not love you, yes.

Loving a child who fakes fearing one monster out of ten thousand is easy, you’ve always known that. Loving the noise that came out of the schism, the raw truths of the universe drilling holes into your mind… I think I tried. I think you tried, too, to love me for trying. But all this time, I still only loved the person that preferred to wither away behind the noise than to follow it. I don’t think I’ve ever even told you that I love you. Not even now that the world is ending, that we are finally ending with it, do I think I can tell you the only truth that the schism could never deliver your way.

Maybe you know already. Maybe you always knew I knew about the monsters. Maybe you knew, too, about the gun.

You say my name now. Without that, the memory would envelop me too quickly. My name. To you, I’m still the child that held your hand. That jumped in front of a gun to save you. I’m still the name you called when they pulled the trigger.

You say my name and I love you for it. But I can’t tell you. I never could tell you.

“I wish you’d stayed aside,” you say.

And what a contradiction that is. You and I, we have never stayed aside. Not even when we should have, when we were told to. Maybe you told me, then, too.

_Get away. Get away!_

Two against one. But the one had a gun, and the two only each other. And you always were smart, but you had the universe in your head and thought that made you invincible when it only made you a Time Lord.

I didn’t touch a gun from that day on. I can still hear the echo of it.

_You saved my life,_ you said. You realized a second too late that I was falling. Not dead, but dying. We’re always dying. It doesn’t matter how many times we come back, we die and die again until we’re gone. I wanted to walk away, then. Get up and walk away.

Two against one, and the one was leaving. One Time Lord down, one busy making sure I stayed down. The enemy had already won.

_I owe you my life,_ you kept saying. _I owe you…_

My blood was staining your shoes. What a silly thing to remember. I haven’t bled out in so long, and I remember that day. You were so scared that you trembled more than me. You were so scared you couldn’t look me in the eye, but I looked at you. Because I’d saved you, because I loved you. You were so scared you were paler than me.

It would have been so easy to leave me there, to leave me dying, to leave me to die and regenerate and find my way. Of course there’s been chances at _aside_ ; I could have dodged the bullet meant for you.

Two asides against one together.

_Anything you want of me…_ you muttered, _I’ll give you. Anything._

I only wanted one thing. And I already had it. I’d had it since the first time you called my name and I called yours in the night.

I only wanted one thing, but I couldn’t say it out loud. I never have been able to.

Don’t make me say it now. The Dalek ships are here. I can hear them hover. Their fire blue against the orange of this burning planet. I can hear the end of all things. Don’t make me say goodbye to you just yet.

You let me bleed on you. You let me silence the words I can never tell you.

The world ends around three words I can’t say that I just hope you know.

Nobody is running away.

What would be the point?

“I wish… we’d done it differently. That’s all,” you keep saying. You say it against my shoulder, against my neck. And I can’t think like this. “Even if it all would have still led us here.”

We couldn’t have foreseen this. Until it was foreseen for us. The game we played was only just that. _A few steps further._ So I took them. _Another lock. Just pick it._ Because you could, you did. Bright young minds, sneaking in the middle of the night to stand in the Matrix. _Open it and see, what’s the harm?_

The Time Vortex hadn’t damaged us enough. We wanted more. We wanted to play with truth. Wouldn’t you go back and change that, out of everything? Just sit in bed that night and tell yourself not to go?

I did know, going in, it wouldn’t be me standing there under the revealing light of the mother memory. I was never half as smart as to hack that.

But to know the secrets of a race, the future of the wars, and the prophecies…

We saw what was foreseen and went back to bed as if nothing had happened.

I wish we’d stolen a TARDIS and run away. Let the Daleks destroy Gallifrey first, then planet after planet. We could have run away forever.

Or dreamed of it, at least. Someone would have caught us. Someone is always catching us in the long stream of events that makes up the unending timeline of what ifs.

“Did you know?” I ask in a mutter.

More ships dive onto our skies. They spin around and around, murderous discs of nothingness. The Daleks come out of them like antigravity bombs, hovering over the city, blasting blue over them. Thousand and thousands per ship. And there’s millions of them coming.

“Did you see it in the schism before we saw it in the Matrix?” I ask.

The inescapable reality that both you and I die in this war, no matter how far we run, no matter when we begin running.

Better to die today than to suffer a million more days of a war that never ends because no one knows how to stop it. Time Wars never _end._ They have a clear beginning, the day the enemy knocks on the door, the day the victim becomes the enemy as well. But they never end, because time can’t end either. Time Wars end without exploding only when you can prevent them from starting before they’ve already begun.

“The Vortex is too vast. And the only way for you to see was… that night,” you tell me. Did you think I would hate you for it? “Maybe I should be sorry I made you _see._ ”

“No, I followed you that night,” I say. “All these years, I’ve followed you...”

There hasn’t been one day I haven’t.

Those dents in the wall? They’re the anger you have but don’t show. I’m your anger when all you are is pain. I choose to stay and be the things you can’t. A mirror? Then that’s what I am. Broken in the corners, rusty in the desert.

Two die in the Time War. Two who never belonged.

I stood in front of this crooked cottage, in these dunes away from the city, with you. It was my decision as much as it was yours. _We can’t have the stars,_ I said to you, _so we’ll have grains of sand and call the desert our universe._ The destination after the prophecies mattered to me, because any destination would have just been a stop in the long way to this Time War. And you didn’t want to run away then. Not from the noise inside your head. Not from the inevitable. We knew what was going to happen, you always knew. We both chose to fill the days from then to here with what we could.

That was your strength.

It’s all going to burn. And we’re going to burn away with it. Be the ashes in the sand.

I thought my strength would be having a span of days to tell you. I want to tell you. Before the ships arrive home.

But you’re barely strong enough to hold yourself upright, and I’m barely managing to stand tall for the both of us. The floor will just have to take us. Let it take us, wooden floorboards to keep us from drowning in sand. In eventual smoke.

When the towers fall, how many deaths will we have already gone through?

“One two three four…” you mutter. “One two three four.”

The rhythm of our hearts. The beats of war. My arms are not enough. All these years I’ve followed you, but I keep wondering. Is anything I’ve tried enough? Or was this written in time long before I tried my first?

My arms, my words. Our story.

You want it to be enough, maybe that _is_ enough.

“D’you remember…?” I’m not even sure you hear me now. Your four knocks take you away, and the ships up there roar closer every second. My words are not my own, they’re just the space between noises. “… the day we left the Academy?”

_Exterminate! Ex-ter-mi-na-te!_

“You looked so fancy in red robes you’d never wear again. Because you said they were unflattering for anybody under 500. Somebody snuck in to mess with the sound system after the ceremonial speeches that made us proper Time Lords instead of just… children who had seen time and lived to tell the tale. We hadn’t had music in so long. D’you remember that?”

“You… cried.”

“I did.” My voice shakes around yours, and I hope you don’t notice.

I think—I think right now there is nothing in Gallifrey that isn’t shaking.

_Ex-ter-mi-na-te!_ _EXTERMINATE!_

There is a chorus of Daleks. They echo in my hearts. The memory of you, somehow, still manages to tremble brighter in them.

“We danced cheek-to-cheek to an old song we’d never heard before,” you say.

“And you teased me endlessly because I didn’t know how to dance.”

“You still don’t.”

How many sounds in ‘exterminate’? How well can they merge together into fear?

“You cried…” you mutter again.

I held you against my chest—in my hand, between my hearts—for the first time in a bright room full of people. It was the first shred of unabridged beauty I’d had in a while. It was also the last.

Childhood come and past, long warm nights spent sleepless and trembling in and out of fear, that room was where finally everybody in it had a glimpse of something good beyond the friends inside a barn. And we were in it. We were in the room that would get us _out_ of the nightmare and into the freedom childhood was supposed to have been like.

You pressed your cheek against mine as we danced, and you smiled against my face. The prospect of the future was in the air, in the very red of our robes. And you whispered in my ear, _so what do you want, sweetheart?_ And I said the thing I’d been thinking for decades, _kiss me._

You did. So of course I cried.

Everybody in that room was going forward in some or other direction. We have all been moving there since. Now, this is the _forward_ that signals the end of the road. And we’re standing by its closed gates.

“D’you remember…?” I mutter now. “What I said?”

Do you know what I meant by it?

_EX-TER-MI-NA-TE!_

If only I could go back and say it to you then, so that I would have made it easier for myself to say it all the times after…

You hold my hand and kiss my knuckles and you nod and you smile. I’ve loved all of your faces. I’ve stood by you all these years and put my lips to your temples when the noise got too loud. I’ve cried when I remembered the song we danced to and the promises we made to end up here today. But nothing matters now, because you smile and… the world could end a thousand times, I wouldn’t care.

“Eleven full lives…” you say, and I can see it right now, the smug face of the child that used to run with me across fields before the Time Lords took us away. “… did you really think I didn’t know?”

The Daleks fire at last and their metallic voices swallow my words before I can say them. I would have meant them. A few words, to make up for everything. To make up at least for one millionth of it all.

You knew, and so did I. But now, at our final death, it turns out I’ve tried to be a little bit braver than what eight-year-old me pretended to be in the night when I fended off your monsters and feared my own in secret.

You’ve lived and died with a coward. And it’s been my honor.

You will always have had the lives of this cowardly immortal in your hand. Between your hearts.

I will always have the words you tell me, before the Dalek rips the pitch out of your voice, the flesh from your skin.

“…you, too…”

**Author's Note:**

> Based on fragments from poems You Are Jeff, Snow and Dirty Rain, and Wishbone in _Crush_ by Richard Siken.


End file.
